EVENTS

Solstice weekend

Everyone says the CFI student leadership weekend was fantastic. Ed Brayton said so, and all the people tweeting about it at the time said so, and the pictures that Paul Fidalgo tweeted said so. (There was one of “James Croft with his invisible yo-yo” that cracked me up.)

CFI goes from strength to strength. Noticed that?

Maryam reports that the Council of Ex-Muslims 5th anniversary bash was also fantastic.

Comments

I did something hopelessly geeky this Summer Solstice. I measured the length of my shadow at local noon.

It was a counterpart to what I did last Winter Solstice. I did that because I wanted to illustrate what may have made people very worried in past centuries: the Sun going downward and downward and downward in the sky in the fall. Thus, winter-solstice celebrations.

I’m about 6′ tall, my winter-solstice shadow about 14′, and my summer-solstice shadow about 2.5′. The Sun’s elevation angle varied between 23d and 67d, giving a latitude of 45d north and an axial tilt of 22d.